Joe Abley wrote:
How much bandwidth is "a lot of bandwidth"?
For a technically savvy domestic consumer, wishing to run a couple of web-sites, and a new world business opportunity. 3-10mb, latency <5ms For any reasonable commercial entity doing increasing amounts of business electronically 10-100Mb. <1ms Net operators and large on-line corporations n x 1000Mb/sec
I see commercial providers with multiple parallel STM-64s plumbed directly into routers either sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, who are struggling to attract customers to even remotely fill the pipes.
Only because the price is wrong. Customers want price-certainty. Bluntly, they will pay a 50-100% premium over their existing marvellous telco charges for 10x the bandwidth and "all-you-can-eat". No one either commercially or domestically will buy into the "Jet-stream" charging model. You have to laugh at the recent gov-fest where EVERY rural broadband group showed market take up at >80%, except the best giggle was the Telecom exercise with the Otago Trust, where the market take up for broadband was "3%", helped by the marvellous Jetstream pricing model (no discounts available).
The situation in the metro and long-haul intracontinental networks is even more fibre-rich. I don't see a need to build another internet here -- I see a need to start using the existing one :)
But I don't like the price of your existing one. As you correctly say, there is ton of un-used fibre sitting there. In the local market (NZ, not Toronto), D-Link are offering Gigabit NIC cards for NZ$95. Price of GBic and low cost switches are falling steadily. New interesting devices with fibre are appearing all the time. I want a fibre to my house, and a fixed price, all-I-can-eat service. (Voice and data) Pretty simple really. This is a not a service that is currently offered, but it doesn't mean people don't want it. Internet 2 and the rural activities are part of "the current charging model doesn't stack up"... Heiniously off-topic and 2c worth. /R
The other one is that the internet2 is supposed to spurr new application development, showing what *can* be done with huge amounts of bandwidth when it's available at low cost. One of the more PR friendly applications would probably be the 'virtual teleconferencing' systems, where 3d models are transmitted along with the video, allowing participants to be rendered in 3d at each end. (Enables you to make direct eye contact, surprisingly important.)
This is the same answer as the one above, really -- "in order to obtain more bandwidth".
So in short, the internet2 initiatives aren't so much about networking anymore, as applications. On the other hand, the vBNS has native multi-cast, Abilene supports IPv6, and CA-net3 is intended to be 'all optical'; they're developing OBGP for instance.
Applications belong at the edge; the core network is necessarily stupid.
If your question was something else, then I'll get blasted for being OT.
No, that was my question, and that's the answer I'm used to hearing. I still don't understand it, though.
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